Comment Thanks for the link. (Score 3, Informative) 551
And while [flat for] "about a decade" is an exaggeration
Bet your ass it's an exaggaration. From the link you gave me:
1998: 11.49 billion
2008: 23.84 billion
That's DOUBLE by any reasonable standard, not "essentially flat."
The year-over-year increases barely kept pace with inflation in most cases, and sometimes fell behind. I don't know about NSF and other non-DoD scientific funding agencies, but I'm guessing they suffered the same fate.
Actually, everything went up faster than inflation. Not even talking about Bush being the
first president to fund stem cell research, or push through actual tests of student/teacher performance.
The only problem I see with Bush's science policy was that he actually gave TOO MUCH to all the Lysenko wannabes over at DoD.